Chapter I: Common Undertakings (2)

Fortunately for the Carolinas, a very notable man had become governor of Virginia ere the Tuscaroras took the war-path. There were tribes at the border,—Nottoways, Meherrins, and even a detached group of the Tuscaroras themselves,—who would have joined in the savage conspiracy against the whites had not Colonel Spotswood been governor in Virginia and shown himself capable of holding them quiet with a steady hand of authority,—a word of conciliation and a hint of force. Alexander Spotswood was no ordinary man. He added to a gentle breeding a manly bearing such as Virginians loved, and the administrative gifts which so many likable governors had lacked. His government was conducted with clear-eyed enterprise and steady capacity. It added to his consequence that he had borne the Queen’s commission in the forces of the great Marlborough on the field of Blenheim, and came to his duty in Virginia (1710) bearing a wound received on that famous field. His blood he took from Scotland, where the distinguished annals of his family might be read in many a public record; and a Scottish energy entered with him into the government of Virginia,—as well as a Scottish candor and directness in speech,—to the great irritation presently of James Blair, as aggressive a Scotsman as he, and more astute and masterful.

It was Colonel Spotswood who, in 1716, gathered a company of gentlemen about him for a long ride of discovery into the Alleghanies. They put their horses through the very heart of the long wilderness, and won their way despite all obstacles to a far summit of the Blue Ridge, whence, first among all their countrymen, they looked forth to the westward upon the vast slopes which fell away to the Ohio and the great basin of the Mississippi. Colonel Spotswood, standing there the leader of the little group, knew that it was this way the English must come to make conquest of the continent. He urged his government at home to stretch a chain of defensive posts beyond the mountains from the lakes to the Mississippi, to keep the French from those inner valleys which awaited the coming of the white man; but he did not pause in the work he could do himself because the advice went unheeded. He kept the Indians still; he found excellent lands for a thrifty colony of Germans, and himself began the manufacture of iron in the colony, setting up the first iron furnace in America. The debts of the colony were most of them discharged, and a good trade in corn, lumber, and salt provisions sprang up with the West Indies. He rebuilt the college, recently destroyed by fire, and established a school for Indian children. He improved as he could the currency of the colony. His works were the quiet works of peace and development,—except for his vigorous suppression of the pirates of the coast,—and his administration might have outrun the year 1722, which saw him removed, had he been a touch less haughty, overbearing, unused to conciliating or pleasing those whose service he desired. He made enemies, and was at last ousted by them.

Some of the best qualities of the soldier and administrator came out in him in the long struggle to put the pirates down once and for all. Queen Anne’s War had turned pirates into privateers and given pause to the stern business for a little, but it began again in desperate earnest when the war was over and peace concluded at Utrecht. It was officially reported by the secretary of Pennsylvania in 1717 that there were still fifteen hundred pirates on the coasts, making their headquarters at the Cape Fear and at New Providence in the Bahamas, and sweeping the sea as they dared from Brazil to Newfoundland. But the day of their reckoning was near at hand. South Carolina had cleared her own coasts for a little at the beginning of the century, but the robbers swarmed at her inlets again when the Indian massacres had weakened and distracted her, and the end of the war with France set many a roving privateersman free to return to piracy. The crisis and turning-point came in the year 1718. That year an English fleet crossed the sea, took New Providence, purged the Bahamas of piracy, and made henceforth a stronghold there for law and order. That same year Stede Bonnet, of Barbadoes, a man who had but the other day held a major’s commission in her Majesty’s service, honored and of easy fortune, but now turned pirate, as if for pastime, was caught at the mouth of the Cape Fear by armed ships under redoubtable Colonel Rhett, who had driven the French out of Charleston harbor thirteen years ago, and was taken and hanged on Charleston dock, all his crew having gone before him to the ceremony. “This humour of going a-pyrating,” it was said, “proceeded from a disorder in his mind, which had been but too visible in him some time before this wicked undertaking; and which is said to have been occasioned by some discomforts he found in a married state”; but the law saw nothing of that in what he had done. While Bonnet awaited his condemnation, Edward Thatch, the famous “Blackbeard,” whom all the coast dreaded, went a like just way to death, trapped within Ocracoke Inlet by two stout craft sent against him out of Virginia by Colonel Spotswood. And so, step by step, the purging went on. South Carolina had as capable a governor as Virginia in Robert Johnson; and the work done by these and like men upon the coasts, and by the English ships in the West Indies, presently wiped piracy out. By 1730 there was no longer anything for ships to fear on those coasts save the Navigation Acts and stress of sea weather.

It was a long coast, and it took a long time to carry law and order into every bay and inlet. But every year brought increase of strength to the colonies, and with increase of strength power to rule their coasts as they chose. Queen Anne’s War over, quiet peace descended upon the colonies for almost an entire generation (1712-1740). Except for a flurry of Indian warfare now and again upon the borders, or here and there some petty plot or sudden brawl, quiet reigned, and peaceful progress. Anne, the queen, died the year after peace was signed (1714); and the next year Louis XIV. followed her, the great king who had so profoundly stirred the politics of Europe. An old generation had passed away, and new men and new measures seemed now to change the whole face of affairs. The first George took the throne, a German, not an English prince, his heart in Hannover; and presently the affairs of England fell into the hands of Sir Robert Walpole. Sir Robert kept his power for twenty-one years (1721-1742), and conducted the government with the shrewd, hard-headed sense and administrative capacity of a steady country squire,—as if governing were a sort of business, demanding, like other businesses, peace and an assured and equable order in affairs. It was a time of growth and recuperation, with much to do, but little to record.

The colonies, while it lasted, underwent in many things a slow transformation. Their population grew in numbers not only, but also in variety. By the end of the war there were probably close upon half a million people within their borders, counting slave with free; and with the return of peace there came a quickened increase. New England slowly lost its old ways of separate action as a self-constituted confederacy; and Massachusetts, with her new system of royal governors and a franchise broadened beyond the lines of her churches, by degrees lost her leadership. She was losing her old temper of Puritan thought. It was impossible to keep her population any longer of the single strain of which it had been made up at the first. New elements were steadily added; and new elements brought new ways of life and new beliefs. She was less and less governed by her pulpits; turned more and more to trade for sustenance; welcomed new-comers with less and less scrutiny of their ways of thinking; grew less suspicious of change, and more like her neighbors in her zest for progress.

Scots-Irish began to make their appearance in the colony, some of them going to New Hampshire, some remaining in Boston; and they were given a right willing welcome. The war had brought sore burdens of expense and debt upon the people, and these Scots-Irish knew the profitable craft of linen-making which the Boston people were glad to learn, and use to clothe themselves; for poverty, they declared, “is coming upon us as an armed man.” These new immigrants brought with them also the potato, not before used in New England, and very acceptable as an addition to the colony’s bill of fare. Small vessels now began to venture out from Cape Cod and Nantucket, moreover, in pursuit of the whales that came to the northern coasts, and it was not long before that daring occupation began to give promise of wealth and of the building up of a great industry. Population began slowly to spread from the coasts into the forests which lay at the west between the Connecticut and the Hudson. In 1730 a Presbyterian church was opened in Boston,—almost as unmistakable a sign of change as King’s Chapel itself had been with its service after the order of the Church of England.

The middle colonies and the far south saw greater changes than these. South Carolina seemed likely to become as various in her make-up as were New York and Pennsylvania with their mixture of races and creeds. Scots-Irish early settled within her borders also; she had already her full share of Huguenot blood; and there followed, as the new century advanced through the lengthened years of peace, companies of Swiss immigrants, and Germans from the Palatinate. Charleston, however, seemed English enough, and showed a color of aristocracy in her life which no one could fail to note who visited her. Back from the point where the rivers met, where the fortifications stood, and the docks to which the ships came, there ran a fine road northward which Governor Archdale, that good Quaker, had twenty years ago declared more beautiful and pleasant than any prince in Europe could find to take the air upon when he drove abroad. From it on either side stretched noble avenues of live oaks, their strong lines softened by the long drapery of the gray moss,—avenues which led to the broad verandas of country residences standing in cool and shadowy groves of other stately trees. In summer the odor of jasmine filled the air; and even in winter the winds were soft. It was here that the ruling men of the colony lived, the masters of the nearer plantations,—men bred and cultured after the manner of the Old World. The simpler people, who made the colony various with their differing bloods, lived inland, in the remoter parishes, or near other harbors above or below Charleston’s port. It was on the nearer plantations round about Charleston that negro slaves most abounded; and there were more negroes by several thousand in the colony than white folk. Out of the 16,750 inhabitants of the colony in 1715, 10,500 were slaves. But the whites were numerous enough to give their governors a taste of their quality.

There were well-developed political parties in South Carolina, for all she was so small; and astute and able men to lead them, like Colonel Rhett, now soldier, now sailor, now statesman, and Mr. Nicholas Trott, now on one side and again on the other in the matter of self-government as against the authority of the proprietors or the crown, but always in a position to make his influence felt. The province practically passed from the proprietors to the crown in 1719, because the people’s party determined to be rid of their authority, and ousted their governor, exasperated that in their time of need, their homes burned about their ears by the savages, their coasts ravaged by freebooters, they should have been helped not a whit, but left to shift desperately for themselves. In 1729 the proprietors formally surrendered their rights. Colonel Francis Nicholson acted as provisional governor while the change was being effected (1719-1725), having been meantime governor of Acadia, which he had taken for the crown. In 1720 he was knighted; and he seems to have acted as soberly in this post in Carolina as he had acted in Virginia. He was truculent and whimsical in the north; but in the south his temper seemed eased and his judgment steadied. The change of government in South Carolina was really an earnest of the fact that the people’s representatives had won a just and reasonable ascendency in the affairs of the colony; and Sir Francis did not seriously cross them, but served them rather, in the execution of their purposes.

Every colony had its own movements of party. Everywhere the crown desired the colonial assemblies to provide a permanent establishment for the governor, the judges, and the other officers who held the King’s commission,—fixed salaries, and a recognized authority to carry out instructions; but everywhere the people’s representatives persistently refused to grant either salaries or any additional authority which they could not control in the interest of their own rights from session to session. They would vote salaries for only a short period, generally a year at a time; and they steadily denied the right of the crown to extend or vary the jurisdiction of the courts without their assent. Sometimes a governor like Mr. Clarke, of New York, long a resident in his colony and acquainted with its temper and its ways of thought, got what he wanted by making generous concessions in matters under his own control; and the judges, whatever their acknowledged jurisdiction, were likely to yield to the royal wishes with some servility: for they were appointed at the King’s pleasure, and not for the term of their good behavior, as in England. But power turned, after all, upon what the people’s legislature did or consented to do, and the colonists commonly spoke their minds with fearless freedom.

In New York the right to speak their minds had been tested and established in a case which every colony promptly learned of. In 1734 and 1735 one John Peter Ziegler, a printer, was brought to trial for the printing of various libellous attacks on the governor and the administration of the colony,—attacks which were declared to be highly “derogatory to the character of his Majesty’s government,” and to have a tendency “to raise seditions and tumults in the province”; but he was acquitted. The libel was admitted, but the jury deemed it the right of every one to say whatever he thought to be true of the colony’s government; and men everywhere noted the verdict.

A second negro plot startled New York in 1741, showing itself, as before, in sudden incendiary fires. It was thought that the slaves had been incited to destroy the town; and there was an uneasy suspicion that these disturbing occurrences were in some way connected with the slave insurrections in the south. Uprisings of the slaves had recently occurred in the West Indies. South Carolina had suffered such an outbreak a little more than two years before. In 1738 armed insurgent negroes had begun there, in a quiet parish, the execution of a terrible plot of murder and burning which it had taken very prompt and summary action to check and defeat. Such risings were specially ominous where the slaves so outnumbered the whites; and it was known in South Carolina whence the uneasiness of the negroes came. At the south of the province lay the Spanish colonies in Florida. Negroes who could manage to run away from their masters and cross the southern border were made very welcome there; they were set free, and encouraged in every hostile purpose that promised to rob the English settlements of their ease and peace. Bands of Yamassees wandered there, too, eager to avenge themselves as they could for the woful defeat and expulsion they had suffered at the hands of the Carolinians, and ready to make common cause with the negroes. When bands of negroes, hundreds strong, began their sudden work of burning, plunder, and murder where the quiet Stono runs to the sea no one doubted whence the impulse came. And though a single rising was easily enough put down, who could be certain that that was the end of the ominous business? No wonder governors at Charleston interested themselves to increase the number of white settlers and make their power of self-defence sure.

Such things, however, serious as they were, did not check the steady growth of the colonies. It was not yet questions of self-government or of the preservation of their peace that dominated their affairs; and only those who observed how far-away frontiers were being advanced and two great nations being brought together for a reckoning face to face saw what was the next, the very near, crisis in store for the English in America. Through all that time of peace a notable drama was in fact preparing. Slowly, but very surely, English and French were drawing nearer and nearer within the continent,—not only in the north, but throughout all the length of the great Mississippi. Step by step the French had descended the river from their posts on the lakes; and while peace reigned they had established posts at its mouth and begun to make their way northward from the Gulf. So long ago as 1699 they had built a stockade at Biloxi; in 1700 they had taken possession of Mobile Bay; by 1716 they had established posts at Toulouse (Alabama) and at Natchez. In 1718 they began to build at New Orleans. In 1719 they captured and destroyed the Spanish post at Pensacola. By 1722 there were five thousand Frenchmen by the lower stretches of the great river; and their trading boats were learning all the shallows and currents of the mighty waterway from end to end. Meantime, in the north, they advanced their power to Lake Champlain, and began the construction of a fort at Crown Point (1721). That same year, 1721, French and English built ominously near each other on Lake Ontario, the English at Oswego, the French at Niagara among the Senecas. In 1716, the very year Governor Spotswood rode through the western forests of Virginia to a summit of the Blue Ridge, the French had found a short way to the Ohio by following the Miami and the Wabash down their widening streams. It was while they thus edged their way towards the eastern mountains and drew their routes closer and closer to their rivals on the coast that that adventurous, indomitable people, the Scots-Irish, came pouring of a sudden into the English colonies, and very promptly made it their business to pass the mountains and take possession of the lands which lay beyond them, as if they would deliberately go to meet the French by the Ohio.

For several years after the first quarter of the new century had run out immigrants from the north of Ireland came crowding in, twelve thousand strong by the year. In 1729 quite five thousand of them entered Pennsylvania alone: and they pressed without hesitation and as if by preference to the interior. From Pennsylvania they passed along the broad, inviting valleys southward into the western parts of Virginia. By 1730 a straggling movement of settlers had begun to show itself even upon the distant lands of Kentucky. Still farther south traders from the Carolinas went constantly back and forth between the Indian tribes of the country by the Mississippi and the English settlements at the coast. Nine thousand redskin warriors lay there in the forests. Some traded with the French at the river, some with the English at the coast. They might become foes or allies, might turn to the one side or the other, as passion or interest led them.

In 1739 the French at the north put an armed sloop on Champlain. The same year the English built a fortified post at Niagara. Everywhere the two peoples were converging, and were becoming more and more conscious of what their approach to one another meant. So long ago as 1720 orders had come from France bidding the French commanders on the St. Lawrence occupy the valley of the Ohio before the English should get a foothold there. The places where the rivals were to meet it was now easy to see, and every frontiersman saw them very plainly. The two races could not possess the continent together. They must first fight for the nearer waterways of the West, and after that for whatever lay next at hand.

It was no small matter, with threat of such things in the air, that the English chose that day of preparation for the planting of a new colony, and planted it in the south between Carolina and the Florida settlements,—a barrier and a menace both to French and Spaniard. It was James Oglethorpe, a soldier, who planned the new undertaking; and he planned it like a soldier,—and yet like a man of heart and elevated purpose, too, for he was a philanthropist and a lover of every serviceable duty, as well as a soldier. He came of that good stock of country gentlemen which has in every generation helped so sturdily to carry forward the work of England, in the field, in Parliament, in administrative office. He had gone with a commission into the English army in the late war a mere lad of fourteen (1710); and, finding himself still unskilled in arms when England made peace at Utrecht, he had chosen to stay for six years longer, a volunteer, with the forces of Prince Eugene in the East. At twenty-two he had come back to England (1718), to take upon himself the responsibilities which had fallen to him by reason of the death of his elder brothers; and in 1722 he had entered the House of Commons, eager as ever to learn his duty and do it. He kept always a sort of knightly quality, and the power to plan and hope and push forward that belongs to youth. He was a Tory, and believed that the Stuarts should have the throne from which they had been thrust before he was born; but that did not make him disloyal. He was an ardent reformer; but that did not make him visionary, for he was also trained in affairs. His clear-cut features, frank eye, erect and slender figure bespoke him every inch the high-bred gentleman and the decisive man of action.

In Parliament he had been made one of a committee to inspect prisons; and he had been keenly touched by the miserable plight of the many honest men who, through mere misfortune, were there languishing in hopeless imprisonment for debt. He bethought himself of the possibility of giving such men a new chance of life and the recovery of fortune in America; and the thought grew into a plan for a new colony. He knew how the southern coast lay vacant between Charleston and the Spaniards at St. Augustine. There were good lands there, no doubt; and his soldier’s eye showed him, by a mere glance at a map, how fine a point of vantage it might be made if fortified against the alien power in Florida. And so he made his plans. It should be a military colony, a colony of fortified posts; and honest men who had fallen upon poverty or misfortune at home should have a chance, if they would work, to profit by the undertaking, though he should take them from debtors’ prisons. Both King and Parliament listened very willingly to what he proposed. The King signed a charter, giving the undertaking into the hands of trustees, who were in effect to be proprietors (June, 1732); and Parliament voted ten thousand pounds as its subscription to the enterprise; while men of as liberal a spirit as Oglethorpe’s associated themselves with him to carry the humane plan out, giving money, counsel, and service without so much as an expectation of gain to themselves, or any material return for their outlay. Men had ceased by that time to dream that colonization would make those rich who fathered it and paid its first bills. By the end of October, 1732, the first shipload of settlers was off for America, Oglethorpe himself at their head; and by February, 1733, they were already busy building their first settlement on Yamacraw Bluff, within the broad stream of the Savannah.

The colony had in its charter been christened Georgia, in honor of the King, who had so cordially approved of its foundation; the settlement at Yamacraw, Oglethorpe called by the name of the river itself, Savannah. His colonists were no mere company of released debtors and shiftless ne’er-do-wells. Men had long ago learned the folly of that mistake, and Oglethorpe was too much a man of the world to repeat the failures of others. Every emigrant had been subjected to a thorough examination regarding his antecedents, his honesty, his character for energy and good behavior, and had been brought because he had been deemed fit. Italians skilled in silk culture were introduced into the colony. Sober German Protestants came from Moravia and from Salzburg, by Tyrol, and were given their separate places of settlement,—as quiet, frugal, industrious, pious folk as the first pilgrims at Plymouth. Clansmen from the Scottish Highlands came, and were set at the extreme south, as an outpost to meet the Spaniard. Some of the Carolina settlers who would have liked themselves to have the Highlanders for neighbors tried to dissuade them from going to the spot selected for their settlement. They told them that the Spaniards were so near at hand that they could shoot them from the windows of the houses that stood within the fort. “Why, then, we shall beat them out of their fort, and shall have houses ready built to live in!” cried the men in kilts, very cheerily, and went on to their settlement.

Fortunately it was seven years before the war with Spain came which every one had known from the first to be inevitable; and by that time the little colony was ready enough. Georgia’s territory stretched upon the coast from the Savannah to the Altamaha, and from the coast ran back, west and northwest, to the sources of those rivers; from their sources due westward “to the South Seas.” Savannah was thus planted at the very borders of South Carolina. New settlers were placed, as they came, some in Savannah, many by the upper reaches of the river. The Highlanders had their post of danger and honor upon the Altamaha; and before war came new settlers, additional arms and stores, and serviceable fortifications had been placed at St. Simon’s Island at the mouth of the Altamaha. Every settlement was in some sort a fortified military post. The first settlers had been drilled in arms by sergeants of the Royal Guards in London every day between the time of their assembling and the time of their departure. Arms and ammunition were as abundant almost as agricultural tools and food stores in the cargoes carried out. Negro slavery was forbidden in the colony, because it was no small part of Oglethorpe’s purpose in founding it to thrust a solid wedge of free settlers between Carolina and the country to the south, and close the border to fugitive slaves. Neither could any liquor be brought in. It was designed that the life of the settlements should be touched with something of the rigor of military discipline; and so long as Oglethorpe himself was at hand laws were respected and obeyed, rigid and unacceptable though they were; for he was a born ruler of men.

He had not chosen very wisely, however, when he brought Charles and John Wesley out as his spiritual advisers and the pastors of his colony. They were men as inapt at yielding and as strenuous at prosecuting their own way of action as he, and promoted diversity of opinion quite as successfully as piety. They stayed but three or four uneasy years in America, and then returned to do their great work of setting up a new dissenting church in England. George Whitefield followed them (1738) in their missionary labors, and for a little while preached acceptably enough in the quiet colony; but he, too, was very soon back in England again. The very year Oglethorpe brought Charles Wesley to Georgia (1734) a great wave of religious feeling swept over New England again,—not sober, self-contained, deep-currented, like the steady fervor of the old days, but passionate, full of deep excitement, agitated, too like a frenzy. Enthusiasts who saw it rise and run its course were wont to speak of it afterwards as “the Great Awakening,” but the graver sort were deeply disturbed by it. It did not spend its force till quite fifteen years had come and gone. Mr. Whitefield returned to America in 1739, to add to it the impulse of his impassioned preaching, and went once more to Georgia also. Again and again he came upon the same errand, stirring many a colony with his singular eloquence; but Georgia was busy with other things, and heeded him less than the rest.

When the inevitable war came with Spain, in 1739,—inevitable because of trade rivalries in the West Indies and in South America, and because of political rivalry at the borders of Florida,—Oglethorpe was almost the first to strike. Admiral Vernon had been despatched in midsummer, 1739, before the declaration of war, to destroy the Spanish settlements and distress Spanish commerce in the West Indies; and had promptly taken Porto Bello in November, scarcely a month after war had been formally declared. Oglethorpe struck next, at St. Augustine. It was this he had looked forward to in founding his colony. In May, 1740, he moved to the attack with a mixed army of redskins and provincial militia numbering a little more than two thousand men,—supported at sea by a little fleet of six vessels of war under Sir Yelverton Peyton. But there had been too much delay in getting the motley force together. The Spaniards had procured reinforcements from Havana; the English ships found it impracticable to get near enough to the Spanish works to use their guns with effect; Oglethorpe had no proper siege pieces; and the attack utterly failed. It had its effect, nevertheless. For two years the Spaniards held nervously off, carefully on the defensive; and when they did in their turn attack, Oglethorpe beat them handsomely off, and more than wiped out the disrepute of his miscarriage at St. Augustine. In June 1742, there came to St. Simon’s Island a Spanish fleet of fifty-one sail, nearly five thousand troops aboard, and Oglethorpe beat them off with six hundred and fifty men,—working his little forts like a master, and his single guard-schooner and few paltry armed sloops as if they were a navy. Such a deliverance, cried Mr. Whitefield, could not be paralleled save out of Old Testament history.

Meanwhile Vernon and Wentworth had met with overwhelming disaster at Cartagena. With a great fleet of ships of the line and a land force of nine thousand men, they had made their assault upon it in March, 1741; but because Wentworth bungled everything he did with his troops the attack miserably failed. He was caught by the deadly wet season of the tropics; disease reduced his army to a wretched handful; and thousands of lives were thrown away in his dismal disgrace. Both New England and Virginia had sent troops to take their part with that doomed army; and the colonies knew, in great bitterness, how few came home again. The war had its issues for them, they knew, as well as for the governments across the water. It meant one more reckoning with the Spaniard and the Frenchman, their rivals for the mastery of America. And in 1745 New England had a triumph of her own, more gratifying even than Oglethorpe’s astonishing achievement at St. Simon’s Island.

Only for a few months had England dealt with Spain alone upon a private quarrel. In 1740 the male line of the great Austrian house of Hapsburg had run out: Maria Theresa took the throne; rival claimants disputed her right to the succession; and all Europe was presently plunged into the “War of the Austrian Succession” (1740-1748). “King George’s War” they called it in the colonies, when France and England became embroiled; but the name did not make it doubtful what interests, or what ambitions, were involved; and New England struck her own blow at the power of France. A force of about four thousand men, levied in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, moved in the spring of 1745 against the French port of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Commodore Warren, the English naval commander in the West Indies, furnished ships for their convoy, and himself supported them in the siege; and by the 16th of June the place had been taken. For twenty-five years the French had been slowly building its fortifications, covering with them an area two and a half miles in circumference. They had made them, they supposed, impregnable. But the English had struck quickly, without warning, and with a skill and ardor which made them wellnigh irresistible; and their triumph was complete. Provincial troops had taken the most formidable fortress in America. William Pepperrell, the gallant gentleman who had led the New Englanders, got a baronetcy for his victory. Warren was made an admiral.

The next year an attack was planned against the French at Crown Point on Champlain, but nothing came of it. The war almost stood still thenceforth, so far as the colonies were concerned, till peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in October, 1748. That peace brought great chagrin to New England. By its terms Louisbourg and all conquests everywhere were restored. The whole work was to do over again, as after King William’s War and the restoration of Port Royal, which Sir William Phips had been at such pains to take. The peace stood, however, little longer than that which had separated King William’s War from the War of the Spanish Succession. Seven years, and France and England had once more grappled,—this time for a final settlement. All the seven years through the coming on of war was plainly to be seen by those who knew where to look for the signs of the times. The French and English in that brief interval were not merely to approach; they were to meet in the western valleys, and the first spark of a war that was to embroil all Europe was presently to flash out in the still forests beyond the far Alleghanies.

It was on the borders of Virginia this time that the first act of the drama was to be cast. The French determined both to shorten and to close their lines of occupation and defence from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi and the Gulf. They knew that they could do this only by taking possession of the valley of the Ohio; and the plan was no sooner formed than it was attempted. And yet to do this was to come closer than ever to the English and to act under their very eyes. A few German families had made their way far to the westward in Pennsylvania, and hundreds of the indomitable Scots-Irish had been crowding in there for now quite twenty years, passing on, many of them, to the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah below, and pressing everywhere closer and closer to the passes which led down but a little way beyond into the valleys of the Alleghany, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. These men, at the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, were sure to observe what was going forward in front of them, and to understand what they saw. Traders crossed those mountains now by the score from the English settlements,—three hundred in a year, it was said. They knew the waters that ran to the Ohio quite as well as any Frenchman did. Their canoes had followed the turnings of the broad Ohio itself, and had found it a highway to the spreading Mississippi, where French boats floated slowly down from the country of the Illinois, carrying their cargoes of meat, grain, tobacco, tallow, hides, lead, and oil to the settlements on the Gulf. In 1748, the year of the last peace, certain leading gentlemen in Virginia had organized an Ohio Land Company,—among the rest Mr. Augustus Washington, who had served with Vernon and Wentworth at Cartagena and had lost his health in the fatal service. He had named his estate by the Potomac, his home of retirement, Mount Vernon, as his tribute of admiration to the gallant sailor he had learned to love during those fiery days in the South. In 1750 the English government had granted to the Company six hundred thousand acres of land on the coveted river. Virginian officials themselves had not scrupled meanwhile also to issue grants and titles to land beyond the mountains. The English claim to the Ohio country was unhesitating and comprehensive.

The English had seized French traders there as unlicensed intruders, and the French in their turn had seized and expelled Englishmen who trafficked there. French and English matched their wits very shrewdly to get and keep the too fickle friendship of the Indians, and so make sure of their trade and their peace with them; and the Indians got what they could from them both. It was a sharp game for a great advantage, and the governments of the two peoples could not long refrain from taking a hand in it.

The French authorities, it turned out, were, as usual, the first to act. In 1752 the Marquis Duquesne became governor of Canada, an energetic soldier in his prime; and it was he who took the first decisive step. In the spring of 1753 he despatched a force to Presque Isle, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, built a log fort there, and thence cut a portage for his boats southward a little way through the forest to a creek (French Creek the English called it afterwards) whose waters, when at flood, would carry his boats to the Alleghany, and by that open stream to the Ohio. It was the short and straight way from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi and the Gulf. At the creek’s head he placed another log fort (Le Bœuf), and upon the Alleghany a rude outpost.

The same year that saw the Marquis Duquesne made governor of Canada saw Robert Dinwiddie come out as governor of Virginia, and no one was likelier than he to mark and comprehend the situation on the border. Mr. Dinwiddie had been bred in a counting house, for he was the son of a well-to-do merchant of Glasgow; but business had long since become for him a matter of government. He had gone in his prime to be collector of customs in Bermuda; and after serving in that post for eleven years he had been made surveyor general of customs in the southern ports of America,—a post in which he served most acceptably for another ten years. For twenty years he had shown singular zeal and capacity in difficult, and, for many men, demoralizing, matters of administration. He had lived in Virginia when surveyor general of customs. During the two years which immediately preceded his appointment to the governorship of the Old Dominion he had engaged in business on his own account in London, and had become by purchase one of the twenty stockholders of the Ohio Land Company. He came to his new office, therefore, acquainted in more than one way with the leading men of the colony,—especially with Mr. Augustine Washington, now the Ohio Company’s president, and the little group of influential gentlemen,—Lees, Fairfaxes, and the rest,—often to be found gathered at Mount Vernon. He came, therefore, with his eyes on the western lands where the company and his government were alike bound to see to it that the French were checked.

He saw Duquesne’s movement, consequently, at its very outset, warned the government at home, and was promptly instructed to require the French “peaceably to depart,” and if they would not go for the warning, “to drive them off by force of arms.” He chose as his messenger to carry the summons Mr. George Washington, half-brother to Mr. Augustine Washington, of Mount Vernon. George Washington was only a lad of twenty-one; but he had hardened already to the work of a man. He had received no schooling in England such as Augustine had had, but had gone from the simple schools and tutors of the Virginian country-side to serve as a surveyor for Lord Fairfax in the rough country of the Shenandoah,—whither Fairfax, heir of the old Culpeper grants, had come to seek a life away from courts in the picturesque wilderness of America. Augustine Washington died the very year Mr. Dinwiddie became governor, though he was but thirty-four; and he had left George, lad though he was, to administer his estate and serve in his stead as commander of the militia of eleven counties. Governor Dinwiddie knew whom he was choosing when he sent this drilled and experienced youngster, already a frontiersman, to bid the French leave the Ohio.

The message was carried in the dead of winter to the grave and courteous soldier who commanded at Fort Le Bœuf; and Washington tried the endurance even of the veteran frontiersman who accompanied him by the forced marches he made thither and back again through the dense and frosted woods, across frozen streams, and through the pathless, storm-beaten tangles of deep forests, where there was hardly so much as the track of a bison for their horses to walk in. He reported that the French had received him very graciously; but had claimed the Ohio as their own, had made no pretence that they would abandon it because the English bade them, and clearly meant to establish themselves where they were. Juniors among their officers had told him so very plainly as he sat with them after dinner in a house which they had seized from an English trader.

BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]

He was back at Williamsburg with his report by the middle of January, 1754; and the next month a small body of frontiersmen was hurried forward to make a clearing at the forks of the Ohio and begin the construction of fortifications there ere spring came, and the French. The French came, nevertheless, all too soon. By the 17th of April their canoes swarmed there, bearing five hundred men and field ordnance, and the forty Englishmen who held the rude, unfinished defences of the place had no choice but to retire or be blown into the water. The French knew the importance of the place as a key to the western lands, and they meant to have it, though they should take it by an open act of war. Their force there numbered fourteen hundred before summer came. They built a veritable fort, of the rough frontier pattern, but strong enough, as it seemed, to make the post secure, and waited to see what the English would do.

Dinwiddie had acted with good Scots capacity, as efficiently and as promptly as he could with the power he had. He was obliged to deal with a colonial assembly,—the French governors were not; and the Virginian burgesses thought of domestic matters when Dinwiddie’s thought was at the frontier. While Washington was deep in the forests, bearing his message, they quarrelled with the governor about the new fees which were charged since his coming for grants of the public land; and they refused him money because he would not yield in the matter. But when they knew how things actually stood in the West, and saw that the governor would levy troops for the exigency whether they acted with him or not, and pay for them out of his own pocket if necessary, they voted supplies.

There was no highway of open rivers for the Virginians, as for the French, by which they could descend to the forks of the Ohio; and Virginia had no troops ready as the French had. Raw levies of volunteers had first to be got together; and when they had been hastily gathered, clothed, and a little drilled, the first use to which it was necessary to put them was to cut a rough, mountainous road for themselves through the untouched forests which lay thick upon the towering Blue Ridge. It was painfully slow work, wrought at for week after week, and the French were safely intrenched at their fort “Duquesne” before the tired Virginian recruits had crossed the crest of the mountains. By midsummer they were ready to strike and drive the English back.

Blood had been spilled between the rivals ere that. Washington was in command of the little force which had cut its way through the forest, and he did not understand that he had been sent into the West this time merely to bear a message. When, therefore, one day in May (28 May, 1754) he found a party of French lurking at his front in a thicketed glade, he did not hesitate to lead an attacking party of forty against them. The young commander of the French scouts was killed in the sharp encounter, and his thirty men were made prisoners. Men on both sides of the sea knew, when they heard that news, that war had begun. Young Washington had forced the hands of the statesmen in London and Paris, and all Europe presently took fire from the flame he had kindled. In July, Washington was obliged to retire. He had only three hundred and fifty men, all told, at the rudely intrenched camp which he had constructed in the open glade of “Great Meadows” as the best place to await reinforcements; and in July the French were upon him with a force of seven hundred. All day he fought (3 July, 1754), and in a drenching rain, the French firing from the edges of the woods, his own men in their shallow, flooded trenches in the open; but by night he knew he must give way. The French offered him an honorable capitulation, and the next day let him go untouched, men and arms, with such stores as he could carry.

It was a bad beginning at winning the West from the French; and all the worse because it showed how weak the English were at such work. The danger was not Virginia’s alone; it touched all the English in America; but the colonies could not co-operate, and, when they acted at all, acted sluggishly, as if war would wait for both parties to get ready. The assemblies of Pennsylvania and New York declared very coldly that they did not see what right the English crown had to the valley of the Ohio. Maryland had been about to raise a force, but had not yet done so when the fatal day at Great Meadows came. Two “independent companies” in the King’s pay had been ordered from New York, and a like company from South Carolina; and North Carolina had sent forward three hundred and fifty men; but only the single company from South Carolina had reached Great Meadows, where Washington was, before the French were upon him.

Dinwiddie and every other governor who heeded or wrote of the business told the ministers in England that they must act, and send the King’s own troops; and happily the ministers saw at last the importance of what should be won or lost in America. Troops were sent. For Europe it was the beginning of the Seven Years’ War (1755-1763), which was to see the great Frederick of Prussia prove his mastery in the field; which was to spread from Europe to Asia and to Africa; which was to wrest from the French for England both India and America. But for the colonists in America it was only “the French and Indian War.” Their own continent was the seat of their thoughts.

The beginnings the home government made were small and weak enough; but it did at least act, and it was likely that, should it keep long enough at the business, it would at last learn and do all that was necessary to make good its mastery against a weaker rival. By the 20th of February, 1755, transports were in the Chesapeake, bringing two regiments of the King’s regulars, to be sent against Duquesne. The French, too, were astir. Early in the spring eighteen French ships of war sailed for Canada, carrying six battalions and a new governor; and though the English put an equal fleet to sea to intercept them, the Frenchmen got into the St. Lawrence with a loss of but two of their ships, which had strayed from the fleet and been found by the English befogged and bewildered off the American coast. The scene was set for war both north and south.

Major General Edward Braddock commanded the regiments sent to Virginia, and was commissioned to be commander-in-chief in America. He therefore called the principal colonial governors to a conference at Alexandria, his headquarters. By the middle of April five had come: Robert Dinwiddie, of course, the governor of Virginia; Robert Hunter Morris, whose thankless task it was to get war votes out of the Pennsylvanian assembly of Quakers and lethargic German farmers; Horatio Sharpe, the brave and energetic gentleman who was governor of Maryland; James DeLancey, the people’s governor, of New York; and William Shirley, governor of Massachusetts, past sixty, but as strenuous as Dinwiddie, and eager for the field though he had been bred a lawyer,—every inch “a gentleman and politician,” it was said. It was he who had done most to organize and expedite the attack on Louisbourg which had succeeded so handsomely ten years ago (1745). He would at any rate not fail for lack of self-confidence. The conference planned an attack on Niagara, to be led by Shirley himself, to cut the French off from Duquesne; an attack on Crown Point, to be led by Colonel William Johnson, of New York, whom the Mohawks would follow, to break the hold of the French on Champlain; an attack upon Beauséjour, in Acadia, under the leadership of Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, of the King’s regulars; and a movement, under the command of General Braddock himself straight through the forests against Duquesne, by the way Washington had cut to Great Meadows.

It would have been much better had General Braddock chosen a route farther to the north, where the Pennsylvanian farmers of the frontier had begun to make roads and open the forests for the plough; but it made little difference, after all, which way he went: his temper and his training doomed him to fail. He lacked neither courage nor capacity, but he sadly lacked discretion. He meant to make his campaign in the wilderness by the rules of war he had learned in Europe, where the forests were cleared away and no subtile savages could dog or ambush an army; and he would take no advice from provincials. Few but Washington cared to volunteer advice, for the commander-in-chief was “a very Iroquois in disposition.” He took two thousand men into the wilderness, with artillery trains and baggage: fourteen hundred regulars, nearly five hundred Virginians, horse and foot, two independent companies from New York, and sailors from the transports to rig tackle to get his stores and field-pieces out of difficulties in the rough road. Washington went with the confident commander, by special invitation, to act as one of his aides, and was the only provincial officer whose advice was given so much as consideration during all the weary weeks in which the little army widened and levelled its way with axe and spade through the dense woods. And then the fatal day came which filled all the colonies with dismay.